The Spanish Colonists

An interview with Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange ($27, Henry Holt, 2008).

On a visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz had a revelation: He knew next to nothing about the 128-year span separating the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and the arrival of the Pilgrims. "Maybe nothing happened in the period between," he writes. "Still it was distressing not to know. Expensively educated at a private school and university--a history major, no less!--I'd matriculated to middle age with a third grader's grasp of early America."

So begins Horwitz's exploration of that lost century and a half, chronicled in A Voyage Long and Strange. In the book, he uses the written accounts of European explorers' encounters in North America--as well as his attempts to retrace their routes--to craft an entertaining narrative of discovery. A Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for TheWall Street Journal, Horwitz has previously retraced history in works such as Confederates in the Attic, an examination of how the Civil War lives on in the South, and Blue Latitudes, in which he follows the voyage of Captain James Cook throughout the Pacific.

Forbes.com: Why write this book now?

Tony Horwitz: I started it four or five years ago and really, as I described in the book, it began with the discovery [of my] own ignorance. I'm someone who always thought of himself as a history nerd and yet here was this huge gap in my knowledge of U.S. history.

In the book, you write about how Spanish explorers reached half of the continental United States in the 1500s. Did that frame the country's current debate about immigration for you in any way?

Immigration wasn't as hot as it has become when I first started. But while reporting the book I couldn't help but be struck by the dissonance between what I was hearing on talk radio as I drove across the country about aliens threatening this country and the history that I was following that told of not only Spanish but French and Portuguese and other non-Anglo people who were here long before the first Anglo settlers.

When we have this immigration debate, let's at least get the history right and be aware that this has been a very complicated and diverse country from the beginning of its European story. The Spanish were a big part of that right at the beginning. This book isn't intended as a statement on the immigration debate, but perhaps it can be a surprising background.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered in your research?

The most surprising thing was the French Huguenots, who were Protestants in Florida. I just simply had no idea that there were European Protestants seeking religious freedom on this continent almost 60 years before the Pilgrims arrived. It made me more aware of how peculiar and arbitrary memory is of our origins. We've simply deleted this episode from our national narrative.

You also travel to places where historical accuracy competes with commercialism, like St. Augustine, Fla.

I think history is always competing with Disney in this country. It was particularly graphic in St. Augustine, where this very rich Spanish history has almost been buried beneath tourist schlock and outright fictions like the Fountain of Youth that are billed as historic that are really not. Unfortunately it's often hard for tourists to distinguish between the two. That adds to the muddle of how we remember this period.

Why do you think that the Spanish influence is greater in the Southwest than in other parts of the country where they traveled?

The native history is very different there. The Pueblo peoples are in many cases living as they did almost 500 years ago when the Spanish first encountered them. They're great survivors and their history and culture is still with us in a way that's not always the case east of the Mississippi, where tribes were either wiped out or forced to relocate. The physical landscape in that area of the country has certainly changed, but less than Florida where so much of their history is paved over. A drive through Arizona still looks largely the same as it did to the Spanish.